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Lovesong, by Alex Miller

Lovesong (2009) is a deceptively simple book, though I only realised the ‘deceptively’ bit when I got to the end. Miller is an experienced, intelligent and subtle writer with a number of literary prizes to his name, so I should have expected it.

Ken is a well-respected author whose decision to retire from writing – his last book was called The Farewell – has left him bored and frustrated. Returning to Melbourne from a sojourn in Venice, he finds there is a new pastry shop down the road, run by Sabiha, who is from Tunisia, and her Australian husband John. He finds the couple interesting, and readily listens as John tells him how he and his wife come to be running a pastry shop in Australia. ‘I was the perfect listener for him,’ Ken says. Most of John’s story – and most of the book – concerns their years in Paris, where they ran a small restaurant in an outer suburb, and Sabiha yearned for a baby. It is told as if by a third person observer, though the focus is on what Sabiha thinks and does. Ken, as narrator, speaks now and again; he has to adjust to his daughter’s new boyfriend. That so much of the story is about Sabiha is a clue to the deceptive part of the simple. How can John, and in turn Ken, know in such detail what she dreams and desires?

A further part of the ‘deceptively simple’ comes from Miller’s prose style, which often favours a run of very short sentences, as in: ‘The summer grass was cool against Sabiha’s bare feet. She sat in the broken shadows under the willow tree. The great old tree leaned far out over the river.’ Of course there are longer sentences too, but the short ones set the tone. The prose is overall straightforward and unadorned, without much by way of metaphor. Where Miller is descriptive, he gives a simple visual picture, as in the lines above. The complexity is reserved for what goes on in his characters’ heads.

John is presented as a kind, well-meaning but rather indecisive man, who feels he is wasting his life. As Ken notes, ‘he hadn’t exactly given himself a starring role in his story. In many ways he had done a pretty good job of effacing himself.’ Sabiha, on the other hand, is strikingly beautiful and has an air of authority about her. But she is consumed by the desire for the child they are unable to conceive. She believes that a daughter is somewhere waiting to be born to her, and that she will not be a real woman unless this comes to pass. ‘She would not face her life as a barren wife.’ How you think about this book will probably depend on your reaction to Sabiha’s plight, and how she deals with it. Miller is good at getting inside people’s heads, as he does here, and his ability to speak with the voice of someone of a different age, sex and background is one of his most startling attributes as a writer. But for all his skill in presenting Sabiha’s point of view, I found myself getting impatient with her. Perhaps this says more about me than it does about the story; I don’t think this is a reaction Miller wants to provoke, and I can understand other people feeling quite differently about it. However no matter what you think of Sabiha’s thoughts and actions, she is forced to conclude: ‘Which ever direction you decided to go, it could not be the right direction. For there was no right direction.’

As you will have guessed by now, the question underlying the novel is whose story is it? Ken may be the perfect listener, but is he also stealing John’s story? Ken says ‘there were things I could have added to his story but I didn’t want to make it up this time. The truth is … I have never really liked making it up. My imagination, such as it is, needs facts to feed off.’ He says he wants to hear the truth from John. But is that what he writes? Hardly. He justifies himself by arguing that a story told to a writer is a gift. ‘It becomes yours.’ ‘I am,’ he says, ‘making something other of John and Sabiha’s story than the story they know.’ All of which is of course comment on Miller’s own practice as a writer, though ultimately he has pretty effectively hedged his bets on the fact/imagination dichotomy.

I was amused to note a reference to Ken at one point feeling like Victor Maskell. He is the Anthony Blunt character in John Banville’s novel The Untouchable. In one of the ‘praise for’ comments at the front of the book, John Banville says that Miller is ‘a wonderful writer’. You scratch my back … But Banville is hardly alone in this view. Miller has won two Miles Franklin awards, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country, and this one won the Age Book of the Year in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

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[…] the poisoned boxwood forest and the bindi weed, the fragrant sandalwood and the rocks and ridges. I remarked in an earlier post about his 2009 book Lovesong that he has an almost uncanny ability to get inside the heads of people […]